by Steve Ersinghaus

89: coma, interlude 18

Oddly enough I could not remember anything else than the most elementary facts of my life.

interlude

I saw two small wasps
having sexual intercourse
on my balcony wall,

one on the top
the other beneath
the one on top
wriggling over the one
on the bottom, who
also wriggled
in a strange
small, energetic struggle

on their route
to light, according
to Vajrayana.

the wasps grew to one wasp
when I moved to the railing
then grew to two wasps
once more as I drew close
and watched them, small
vespids doing what vespids
do with small dots of pollen
on their shuddering forms,
I watched, until the one on top
finished and flew away
and the one on the bottom
flew away into the light
behind the trees.

did you find it fascinating?
the woman with the tulip cup
said, watching the wasp.

it was two wasps, I said,
having sex, mating.

I only saw you studying
one wasp or what I thought
might be a small stain,
the woman said.

that’s because from your
distance they appeared
as one wasp
or a small stain
but they
were really two wasps,
mating, having sexual
intercourse.

and you were watching them,
the woman observed,
but this time she held
a wine glass with red liquid inside.

yes, I said. I have a question,
I said. She said, What’s your question?
I’ve been living here a year,
you’ve been living here not too long
and I’ve never asked for your name.
It’s true, she said, you never have.

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100 Days :: Summer 2011

This will be my fourth year participating in the fun, exciting, and challenging 100 Days projects: year 1 I wrote one hundred poems; year two I wrote one hundred stories; year three I wrote 100 fictions. For 2011 I will round things out with another 100 poems.

But what's the intention. This summer my focus will be on hunting things down and tagging, hyperlinking, and using social media to identify those found items that inspire the poems. I will be watching for what the artists, musicians, and other creators do and will try to make poetry out of "found relationships." But also thinking hard about imagery, language, and orthographics. I've never been comfortable with punctuation in poetry but I am fascinated by putting heavy trucks on the edges of leaves or turning one celled creatures into things that point north, where yellow ducks live.